Silvia Park no longer needed her uterus. So she donated it to someone who does.

The 49-year-old mother-of-three had happily raised a transgender son, another child and stepchild and knew she did not want any more children.

She told Cosmopolitan that watching and standing in solidarity with him through his transition made her realize her uterus might be able to help a transgender woman.

No one has successfully transplanted a uterus to a person born with male anatomy so far and transplanting a uterus at all is still a highly experimental procedure.

But Park hopes that the surgery to transfer her uterus to another anatomical woman will help doctors at Baylor University better understand the procedure so that one day it might help a transgender woman to bear children.

At 44, Park got a crash course in gender.

She had no idea that her son, who was assigned female at birth, had gender dysphoria until he announced it plainly to her in the car at age 16: ‘I’m a boy,’ Park recalls him telling her in the car in the hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.

We do not have a very exact measure of how many people in the US are transgender.

The US Census Bureau has only recently added a question to its survey asking if Americans identify a member of a single group encompassing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or gender non-conforming people.

We do know that those numbers are rising, but low. One University of California, Los Angeles study estimated about 0.7 percent of teenagers are transgender; a University of Minnesota study in 2018 suggested that almost three percent of 11th graders there were transgender or gender non-conforming.

Park had had no idea that her child was among those teenagers, but neither she nor her husband hesitated to jump to his support and dive into the transgender community.